rbeck in 1813
relinquished the Protestant faith of his forefathers and joined the
Roman Catholic Church. Obviously in these pages polemics are out of
place, and the step which the conscientious painter thought fit to take
has to be here noted so far only as it serves as an index to character
and as an interpretation of art. Rightly to judge the case, it were well
correctly to estimate Overbeck as a man: his strength lay within his
art, outside which he had infirmities; his bodily health was feeble, his
mind to the extreme refined and to the last degree sensitive; he shrank
from the conflict of life; common people he could not associate with;
for the ordinary world he was wholly unfit, and sought refuge in some
ideal not yet reached. Niebuhr truly reads the character when he writes:
"Overbeck is an enthusiast and quite illiberal; he is a very amiable man
and endowed with a magnificent imagination, but incapable by nature of
standing alone, and by no means so clear-headed as he is poetical. He
bends easily and naturally under the yoke of the Catholic faith."

Overbeck doubtless felt all the more need of safe anchorage from the sea
of troubles on which many minds were cast through the controversy and
scepticism which agitated Protestant Europe. In Lubeck, as we have seen,
the phases of faith were philosophic and aesthetic, and the divinities of
Olympus and Parnassus shared equal favour with the saints of the Church.
The young painter was cast in a severer mould, and needed that the
infinite and eternal should be circumscribed by definite form. It is
reported of a certain German philosopher that, when addressing his
class, he ended with the words:--"In the next lecture we shall proceed
to construct God!" Overbeck preferred to such speculation the authority
of the Church. The painter Joseph Fuhrich puts the case strongly:[3] he
declares that his friend had to take the choice between Pantheism and
Catholicism. Overbeck felt that art was a religious question, and he
determined that all his work should be a protest against the
indifferentism and latitudinarianism which account all religions equal.
He conceded that secular writings and mundane arts were not without
their value and charm; in the arts may be permitted divers
manifestations, such as landscape, animal, and flower painting. The
Church is tolerant of all that is good, but on the highest pinnacle
stands the Christian painter. Over these matters he had pondered long,
an